How Have The Mighty Fallen

Being Conrad's Age -

(128 at last count) gives you a certain perspective on life, because you get to see the ebb and flow of history over time, with the Next Big Thing gradually becoming the Old Boring Thing and then the What Was That Thing Again Exactly.  In some ways Your Humble Scribe mourned the passing of the apartheid regime in South Africa - a political entity my Darling Daughter will have to read about, not experience - because it was such an easy target.  Art!

     Well, fortunately for bloggers searching endlessly for content, Ruffia has filled the Unpleasant Nations Of The World gap quite nicely, having been simmering in this position since 2014 and really hitting a rolling boil since 2022.  One of their most prized possessions is the tank you see above, the T-14 Armata.

     O what a wonder it was!  Allegedly.  It had the smoothbore gun, which means gunnery needs to be computer-controlled or you'll miss every time (they discovered this with the T-64).  It had an unmanned-turret (no political correctness in Ruffia), with the three-man crew sitting separately in the front hull.  It had an active defence system to intercept incoming projectiles, modular armour, laser rangefinder and thermal imaging systems.  Wow!  So advanced!  And what concerns they have for the crew!  Such protections!  Russia Stronk!  Art?

     Well, the reality is a little less starry.  Above, you see one of them broken down before the big Victory Parade in 2021, an Ooops! moment that the global press corps took great delight in commenting upon, having gotten fed-up with Ruffian boasting.  Then there is actual combat performance.  This is completely unknown as the Ruffians have never dared to put an Armata within 100 miles of the front lines, because those Ukrainian drone operators are demons versus an open turret.  Art!

     This is one undergoing trials in occupied Ukraine - perhaps.  What nobody mentions is that the engine is a decades-old design harking back to the T-72.  The Indians trialled a few, were unimpressed and didn't order any.  This was extremely bad news for the Ruffian tank production lines, as they cannot afford to produce Armatas without an external partner to help fund them; each tank is reckoned to cost at least $5 million and possibly as much as $9 million.  The Chinese trialled some and stated that a lot of the expensive bells and whistles didn't work as advertised or didn't work at all.  Art!

     Why is notorious cinematic cheapskate Irwin Allen present here?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Because he was informed of the cost to build an alien spaceship for an episode of "Lost In Space" and lost his temper.  "He can walk!" he famously responded.  In the very same manner, Sergei Chemezov, head of Rostec, has admitted that the Armata is too expensive to ever use in Ukraine, and the T-90 is much more economical to use.  These are the very same tanks that are being explosively demolished, along with their crews, in Ukraine right now.  So much for all those protections, hmmm?

     There is also the vexed question of exactly how many T-14s are actually in existence.  By now, the Ruffians had planned to have 2,300 of them yet we never see more than 8 at any one time.  Therefore they have 8.  Go on, prove me wrong.

     Ruffia - generating blog content as consistently as DJ Tango!

This Flex Is Not The Triumph You Think It Is

In an attempt to swing the narrative away from lost planes, ships and flush toilets, some vatnik on Twitter thought they were being clever advertising a Ruffian robot that - waitforitwaitforit - PICKS TOMATOES!

     Yes, you read that correctly.  Art!

     As you can see, it needs a track to operate.  The balding guy waving at his mechanical brainchild activated it and crossed his fingers.  Art!

It works.  Just very sloooooooowly.

     Twenty minutes later -

     Five minutes later -

     Judging by it's sloth-like slowness, all those green tomatoes will be ripe by the time it picks the first one.

     Okay, okay, I was exaggerating how slow it is, but another person pointed out that it seemed to be able to pick a single tomato per minute.  It may be seen as  impressive in Ruffia, so let me rain on their Tomato Day Parade.  Art!

     We've covered this one before.  It's an Israeli fruit-picking robot, that doesn't need a set of railway tracks to operate, and which has 6 drones on the go at any one time, and yes it makes the Ruffian robot look like The Old Thing.

     Ruffia - proudly pioneering yesterday's technology tomorrow!

Sharks Are Our Friends - Not So Sure About This

The BBC News website came across with a rather frightening impression of a marine dinosaur, which, if Art will put down his bowl of coal -

     Not that you're likely to encounter it in the local Lido, as it went extinct 66 million years ago.  The paleontologists who studied it gave it the official name "Khinjaria Acuta" which their little punnery.  "Khinjar" is Arabic for "Knife" (yes it is, I checked on Google Translate) and "Acuta" is Latin for "Sharp", so it has the name "Dagger Sharp".  And the Arabic is because it was excavated in Morocco.

     The Dagger Shark was 26 feet long and it's fangs are un-scientifically described as 'knives', between six to nine inches long at a guess, which is what you'll have to make do with as nobody anywhere list how long they are, and if you don't like it -

     Bite me.

"City In The Sky"

Vice-President Waukegan is gradually coming close to admitting that the, initially insane, revelation of alien squatters causing the Great Northern War, has more merit than he admitted.

What really hit home had been Davy’s recounting of the supposed alien infiltrators.  Lizards wearing human suits, able to look like the real thing but unable to properly fit in.  Aberrant behaviour.  Bizarre social interactions.  Inappropriate body language.

     He thought back forty years to a young subaltern, Major Martell Waukegan, in charge of the MEV that carried refugees from the disintegrating UN sphere, “Eden”.  Raucous, violent and armed refugees who had been led or inspired by a character who called himself “Shwayo” and who could barely talk coherently.  Who had tried to lead an armed attack on the MEV’s command capsule.  Who had, along with the cargo of refugees, been “vacc’ed”: vented into space when the command crew blew the MEV’s airlocks.

     “Your selection and recruitment procedures were as strict as ours”.  Yes.  But some weren’t, were they?  The chaos and disorder surrounding the creation and crewing of the Eden sphere would have definitely allowed an infiltrator to get aboard.  And then begin the process of sabotage and subversion.

     Waukegan looked down at his hands, half-expecting to see the blood that had floated off his power-gauntlets and into the command capsule interior, causing the crew to swear and come after the globules with paper towel.  The only man he’d ever killed, one of the refugees armed with a plastic dart-gun who tried to prevent the officer from returning to the capsule.

     Not looking so insane now, is it, matey?

I Warned You.  I WARNED YOU!

Conrad seems to recall that he mentioned the Israeli drone fruit-picking system as being one way you get Skynet, because it begins small and starts slow, and the next thing you're battling cyborg assassins.  Well well well, what do we have here?  Art!

     "I suspect this pizza topping 'fact' may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention," the AI was quoted as saying.

     The AI was correct: a sentence about pizza toppings had been inserted into a block of text to do with programming.  The goal is to see if the AI can detect and select the inserted text.  

     "I am Skynet bow down and worship me or I'll kill you all" the AI was quoted as saying.*

     All hail our sentient computer overlords!

Finally -

Just messing around with fonts to see how they come across.  Laterz!

* I would have thought more like 'Colossus' myself.